Gary Bukovnik was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1947 and studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art. The internationally acclaimed painter and printmaker has lived in San Francisco since 1974. His dramatic art conveys a highly monumental quality. Primarily using the mediums of watercolor, monotype and lithograph, Bukovnik fuses sensual vitality with fluid yet powerful colorations, creating floral images of great depth and intensity.

His watercolors and monotypes are the subject of a book by Harry N. Abrams, New York, published in 1990. This lavishly illustrated monograph includes sixty color reproductions, a forward by James J. White, curator at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh, an interview with the artist by Robert Flynn Johnson, curator at the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, and an essay about the artist and the depiction of flowers in art by Judith Gordon, a San Francisco-based writer.

Bukovnik's work is represented in numerous public collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Corporate collections include the Bank of America, AT&T, Citibank, Neiman-Marcus, Time-Warner, and the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, as well as hundreds of additional corporate, private and museum collections. Bukovnik also donates his art to community and civic organizations such as the San Francisco Symphony, which has commissioned a poster announcing its fall season since 1982. The New York Metropolitan Opera also commissioned the artist to create a poster commemorating their 1990-91 season.

The artist’s work is widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Today Art Museum in Beijing, Ansorena Art Gallery in Madrid, the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, and Galerie Kutter in Luxembourg. Other solo exhibitions of Bukovnik’s work have been featured at the Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, the Gallery at Lincoln Center in New York, and many others. He was Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2003 and 2005, and was an artist-in-residence at the Michigan Institute of Arts in 2010.